Problem: Your mismanagement of the country from 2000 to 2008--exemplified in the public memory by your hubristic, fraudulent, and unbelievably costly invasion and occupation of Iraq--shattered public trust in your party and handed your opposition a simple and effective way to discredit your policies a full decade later.

Well, that's weird. That whole thing was George Bush's idea, wasn't it? And yet this guy is claiming it was the right thing to do? How can that be right?Isn't it odd how everybody stopped keeping a death toll of Americans killed overseas after January 20, 2009? But then, as the great lady once said: What difference does it make?

The Civil War spread the use of anesthesia. World War II helped to start the antibiotics revolution.

And now, the Iraq war and its deadly roadside bombs are advancing the development of prosthetics for those who have lost limbs. So far, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have left roughly 1,000 U.S. soldiers with amputations. The vast majority have lost feet and legs, but about 200 soldiers have lost fingers, hands and arms, said Ryan Blanck, upper-extremity specialist at the U.S. Armys Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio, a $65 million ...

aaronx:I remember hearing that all the Iraqi soldiers kept 'melting away' (like the Wicked Witch of the West, I guess).

Turns out -- and this ended up being hilarious -- they had all just gone home with their weapons in order to be ready for the inevitable civil war. An inevitable civil war that our generals and our Secretary of Defense and our President (or even the guy in charge, our Vice President) didn't seem to have anticipated for even a second.

"Yay, we won!" I kept hearing. "Man, we're farked" is what I was thinking.

Actually, all those guys mentioned wrote a report 10 years previous during the first Bush administration predicting that all that would happen. For the life of me, I don't understand why people didn't make more mention of that or why all those guys forgot about it themselves. They, themselves, predicted it.

Did they just go retarded while they were out of office? WHY would they screw up so badly?

When my wife and I got divorced, the kids ended up hating me and refusing to speak to me, I lost more money than I had, my lawyer screwed me over, and she got the house and the dog, but it went on the record in open court that she did, in fact, sleep with my business partner. She finally admitted it! I won! Also, I got the DVD collection.

The United States has not "lost" Iraq. Instead, in Iraq, the United States has found a partner for our shared strategic concerns and our common efforts on energy, economics and the promotion of peace and democracy.

netizencain:"Despite all the problems of the past decade, the overwhelming majority of Iraqis agree that we're better off today than under Hussein's brutal dictatorship.Iraqis will remain grateful for the U.S. role and for the losses sustained by military and civilian personnel that contributed in ending Hussein's rule. These losses pale by comparison, of course, to those sustained by the Iraqi people."

Only Shell out of those is US:Shell Oil Company is a 50/50 partner with the Saudi Arabian government-owned oil company Saudi Aramco in Motiva Enterprises, a refining and marketing joint venture which owns and operates three oil refineries on the Gulf Coast of the United States.

So, yeah, "we liberalized the Iraqi oil market, bringing it to the world marketplace... and effectively cutting out the Iraqis from their inherited natural resources".

But, we paid the cost of the war MUCH MORE than the governments of the companies that got those oil contracts.We did the heavy lifting and then didn't get the spoils.

I recall before the Iraq war started it was said in front of Congress that the oil would pay for the war... how can that be if only ONE US company that is 50% Saudi owned got two of the smaller Iraqi oil field contracts?

If we had invested the $2.2 trillion in wind and solar, the US would be generating 21% of its electricity with renewable energy. If we had invested the $3.9 trillion that the war in Iraq will ultimately cost, we would generate nearly 40% of our electricity with new renewables. Combined with the 10% of supply from existing hydroelectricity, the US could have surpassed 50% of total renewables in supply. Link

vartian:Well, that's weird. That whole thing was George Bush's idea, wasn't it? And yet this guy is claiming it was the right thing to do? How can that be right?

Isn't it odd how everybody stopped keeping a death toll of Americans killed overseas after January 20, 2009? But then, as the great lady once said: What difference does it make?

We're seriously having a conversation about an opinion piece in the Daily Caller - like it matters?

By Treacher - one of the worst and most shameless of their contributors.

He doesn't care about any issue. He just likes to rile liberals. So I'm with you -- if you know that's his only goal, anything resembling an actual opinion or argument can be safely (and wisely) disregarded.

JerseyTim:I'd like to make a joke about how this sounds like it could have come from Baghdad Bob, but it turns out that farking guy was right.

As a 2012 CIA study concluded definitively, Saddam Hussein didn't have weapons of mass destruction. Nor did Iraq have 18 mobile laboratories for making anthrax and botulism, as Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed before the United Nations in February 2003, nor had Saddam Hussein recently tried to buy large quantities of uranium from Africa, as President Bush asserted in his 2003 State of the Union address. A decade of war was based on things that had never taken place.

No matter how many times I read that, or think about it, it still is depressing as fark.